paynt - 5:31 pm on Sep 27, 2002 (gmt 0)

exact phrase anchor text in external links is what matters

Which continues to prove itself out with each update.

Exact phrase matching in the title or on the page used to be very important. Now it seems to be much less so

I suggest it’s too early to tell and that spammy results often settle down by the time Google calms down and that we may want to wait and see with this one. I at least haven’t had time to do more than gather the data in.

Google may be filtering out or discounting the weight of internal links

I’m not seeing that from the sites I’m looking at. What I see so far is that the internal linking is being grouped together better in the backward link checks I’ve been running. If I see any sign of discounting internal linking but right now I’m not seeing that. Like I said though I’m just gathering in the data and haven’t had a chance to analyze anything yet. I like to give things a chance to settle down.

So I think that maybe internal links are discounted unless internal links are all Google has to work with for that page.

That’s an interesting theory. Thanks for the heads up, I’ll keep an eye out on that as I work my way through my data.